Like many people I thought that Google was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe I was dazzled by the Google Doodles or that Google seemed to be everywhere, with their special cars, glasses, and other innovations constantly making the news. Regardless of the reason, if I needed information I turned to Google. Recently, I have learned that Google is not as wonderful as they would like us all to believe. Sure their employees may have some of the coolest working conditions known to man, but the money and management behind this company may be less than the awesome hipsters they pretend to be. From now on I shall embrace new ways to search the internet. Some of the search engines I learned about in my Instructional Technology Applications class will help me in this new venture. While some may prove to be a bit complicated, like wolframAlpha, others though will be extremely helpful, especially once I am a teacher. WolframAlpha is also a little too close to the big, bad law firm Wolfram and Hart from Joss Whedon's Buffy spin off Angel. InstaGrok is the search engine I am most enthusiastic about. As a Social Studies teacher, I can see hundreds of uses for this website. Students could use InstaGrok for research projects, presentations, make note cards to study, or take the tests offered by this site to test their knowledge before taking a classroom assessment. As a teacher, I will use InstaGrok to create engaging and visually appealing lectures and presentations for my students. I could see the class working together to build a web together. One of the most useful features of this website is the ability to adjust the difficulty levels of the results. This will help me to differentiate lessons within the same class. Overall, this website will be immensely helpful once I get a classroom of my own. Here is a slideshow highlighting some of the cool search engines and features that will be beneficial in a classroom. InstaGrok web about King Henry VIII. This website is extremely helpful in the way it organizes the information it finds.
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While we do not live in a world that has robots as sophisticated as C3PO, we are very close to that reality. As teachers we need to keep up on the latest technology, embrace it, and use it in our classrooms or our students will suffer in the long run. We must be able to train our students to live and work in the future, not the present, and the only way we can do that is by keeping up on current technologies and learning them ourselves. My hope is to teach history through technologies that our fore fathers could never have imagined possible. or even condemned as witch craft.. This will help my students become engaged in my lessons and develop a love of history instead of despising it like so many people do today. This is an advertisement from Smart Technologies, but it shows a cute animated version of the history of technology in the classroom. Here is a link to US Department of Education's webpage dedicated to "Effects of Technology on Classrooms and Students." |